Post Christmas Catch-Up

If you’re like me, you took a little vacation from the news, this past week to focus on Christmas. I actually avoided the news because I didn’t want it to dampen my spirits. There’s little good news out there, I’m afraid.

Yes, as much as I respect John Boehner, he’s been muffing up the Fiscal Cliff talks, very badly. He made a huge tactical error when he agreed to Obama’s tax hike, as Phil Klein explains at The Washington Examiner:

After the election, when Obama came out with his $1.6 trillion demand, Boehner should have done a better job of communicating that this represented double what Obama pushed for during the campaign. But that point was never driven home well. Instead, early on in the process, Boehner offered around $800 billion in revenue, and that became the floor for tax increases rather than the ceiling. The Wall Street Journal reported on the following exchange earlier this month:

At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr. Boehner told the president, “I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?”

“You get nothing,” the president said. “I get that for free.”

In reality, post-election, Boehner should have started off at $0 and Obama should have been at around $800 billion. But now, Boehner has already gone as high as $1 trillion in tax hikes and Obama says that’s insufficient. At the same time, Obama says that his willingness to accept $1.2 trillion in tax hikes — 50% more than he campaigned on — represents a compromise on his part.

When conservatives shot down Boehner’s fiscal cliff “Plan B” vote last week, they were sending a message loud and clear that they weren’t pleased with his handling of the issue. Because of this, and his failure to deal with ObamaCare effectively, it appears that some House members might try to unseat Boehner as speaker.

The Republican Party for the Sixth Congressional District of Virginia has formally requested its GOP congressman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, to oppose the re-election of House Speaker John Boehner, Breitbart News has learned.

On November 10, the local district committee–which officially represents Republicans, including Goodlatte, in his district–unanimously passed a resolution to ask Goodlatte to vote for someone other than Boehner. The party believes Boehner hasn’t used his full power to fight against Obamacare.

“The imposition of Obamacare against the wishes of the people is an unequivocal expression of the anticipated tyrannical powers,” the district committee wrote to Goodlatte. “Yet even though every member of the House of Representatives is aware of his ability to thwart this measure, no such effort of protection is forthcoming. Apparently few enough care more about the people they purport to represent than about their own political aspirations.”

No, you don’t need a potted plant and you don’t even to be black or even Hispanic; as long as you are a woman (or related to one) and you fill out the forms correctly, you can collect the money because nobody will verify your information.

Welcome to the Love settlement for women farmers, the close relative of the Pigford black famers settlement that has already paid out billions of dollars to thousands of claimants and the Garcia Hispanic / Latino farmer settlement that is in progress right now.

Here’s how you can collect $50,000, tax free.

This first point can’t be stressed enough; nobody will verify the information you provide. Any claim you make will be accepted as true.

You read that correctly; nobody will verify what your claim. This is the same standard used in the Pigford settlement, and the fact that nobody will verify any information collected was confirmed in a Government Accountability Office report last month. Legally, nobody CAN verify any information; the law was written to make it impossible for the people looking at the claim forms to verify that their information is correct.

If you’re still nervous that someone might actually run down your information to make sure it’s actually true, you don’t have much to worry about from the media, either. We’ve been reporting on the multi-billion dollar fraud in the Pigford settlement for over two years and despite exposing the fraud, for the most part the mainstream media has turned a blind eye. Literally, thousands of people have collected billions of dollars already in a scheme that black farmer Lucious Abrams calls ‘the biggest fraud perpetrated on the American taxpayer in history’ and there’s been an effective blackout.

And guess what? The Republican establishment can’t be bothered with the billions of dollars of fraud going into these settlements. They might be called raaaaacist, so they just look the other way.

President Obama has a very serious ego problem, and when he goes off teleprompter, it sticks out like a sore thumb. His eulogy for Senator Inouye on Friday was grotesque in its focus on the speaker, not the dearly departed.

Unsurprisingly, President George W. Bush delivered a graceful eulogy for Gerald R. Ford’s funeral, a model from which his successor should, but will not, learn. As David Paulin points out:

A great funeral eulogy and not a single mention of “I” or “me” by President Bush. He says “us” and “we” at two points, both only in respect to the American people. Bush’s speech is devoted entirely to Ford’s life, character, and public service — and he provides wonderful anecdotes that brings these things to life.

For those who like to keep count, in the short 1,600 word speech, Obama used the word “my” 21 times, “me” 12 times, and “I” 30 times. But that’s not even the worst of it…

The story of the trip set up the punch line. He told Inouye’s mourners that “my mother that summer would turn on the TV every night during this vacation and watch the Watergate hearings,” and he was forced to watch, too. Of course, the senator who “fascinated” him most was “this man of Japanese descent with one arm, speaking in this courtly baritone, full of dignity and grace.”

This story would work only if Obama had toured the United States during the summer of the Watergate hearings, 1973, when he was eleven years old going on twelve, but in his memoir Dreams from My Father, he tells another story — a much more specific one. Yes, he made the same trip, but he did so “during the summer after my father’s visit to Hawaii, before my eleventh birthday.” This would have been 1972, when Watergate was still a third-rate burglary that had gotten little media traction.

In Dreams, Obama mentioned a Kansas City stop along the way, and Madelyn’s youngest brother in suburban KC would later provide photographic evidence of the same. He confirmed the year as 1972. This disparity did not stop Obama from relating in Dreams how in that elusive summer he “watched the Watergate hearings every night before going to bed.” There was no mention of Senator Inouye. He was apparently trying to make some other point.

If you live in New York’s Westchester and Rockland counties, The Journal News gave rapists, thieves and murderers the best Christmas present they could ever hope for… a roadmap of the homes they should avoid and those which they can target without fear.

The Journal News decided to aid and abet criminals by publishing the names and addresses of hundreds of law abiding citizens who have a legal permit for a gun.

A criminal’s worst nightmare is being confronted by a would-be victim who has the means to protect themselves and their family. The criminal’s intention is to commit their crime and get away with it. Clear-thinking people know this.

Think of all the homes you’ve seen with a “Beware of Dog” sign. Property owners post a sign like this to deter criminals by letting them know of the violent force they’ll encounter should they attempt to enter the property. Home security systems are another method of protection used by millions of families to deter criminals.

Thanks to The Journal News, criminals now know the addresses of those who may confront them with a gun. But most importantly, the published list lets them know the homes where they will NOT be confronted with a gun, thereby further increasing the chance of their success in committing the intended crime.

The map indicates the addresses of all Journal News Employees in the New York Tri-State area. Each dot represents an individual Journal News employee — a reporter, editor or staffer. The data does not include freelancers — reporters or photographers — which can be hired without being an employee. Being included in this map does not mean the individual at a specific location is a responsible reporter or editor, just that they are a reporter or editor.

Oh dear … the plot grows ever thicker. David Gregory, currently under investigation for brandishing a high-capacity magazine on “Meet the Press,” may be guilty of not only violating DC gun laws, but of doing so intentionally. An email purportedly from the DC Metropolitan Police Department suggests that NBC inquired about using a high-capacity magazine for the “Meet the Press” segment and that the request was denied.

Throw the book at him.

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A few more names to add to your list of conservative friendly businesses that you might want to patronize:

A global activist group is targeting two large hotel chains because they give discounts to members of the National Rifle Association.

The organization is putting pressure on the hotel chains to force them to disassociate from the gun-rights group after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

The group, Avaaz, described as a “a global campaign network of 17 million people” is pressuring “Wyndham Hotels Worldwide – which owns Ramada, Days Inn, Wingate and Super 8 – and Best Western” because both organizations are listed as “friends of the NRA” on the NRA’s website.

Joseph Huff-Hannon, a senior campaigner at Avaaz, said the hotels needed to “get out of bed with the extremist NRA,” and “Newtown must mark the end of the group’s stranglehold on our politics.”

Avaaz has organized a petition that has “at least 66,000” signatures, and some of Avaaz’s members have written that the hotel chains should “get out of bed,” parroting Huff-Hannon’s comments on the offical Facebook pages of the Wyndham Hotels and Best Western.

I shared an excerpt of an e-mail I received from Joe Cascarelli of Westcliffe, CO, in my syndicated column today (here), which is adapted from my recent blog post on things parents can do post-Newtown without relying on government. Cascarelli describes a community organizing effort that every liberty-loving parent can get behind. I’m reprinting more of the e-mail for you below. If you do something like this in your school district/neighborhood, speak up and let me know. I’d like to spotlight as many examples as possible.

The petition, addressed to the British Home Secretary Theresa May simply states: “Stop Piers Morgan from being deported back to the UK from America.”

The request to keep Morgan out includes a nine-minute YouTube video of Morgan, former News of the World editor, testifying before the before the 2011 Leveson inquiry into British press ethics following the mobile phone hacking scandal at News of the World.

If he didn’t believe in karma before, Piers Morgan must surely do now.

The ex-newspaper editor, now a columnist for The Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine, took great delight in making fun of President Bush for falling off a Segway – the two-wheeled, motorised, gyroscopically balanced scooter that, its makers promise, will never fall over.

His paper, the Daily Mirror, ran the headline in 2003: “You’d have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn’t you Mr President.” It added: “If anyone can make a pig’s ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can.” So, it seems, can Mr Morgan.

Scroll to the bottom of the page to watch our exclusive video of Piers’s fall…

When you argue for a living, you can tell how an argument is going for you. The evidence and my gut both tell me that the liberals have lost control of the gun control narrative.

Not for lack of trying – it was almost as if they were poised to leap into action across the political, media and cultural spectrum the second the next semi-human creep shot up another “gun free zone.” This was their big opening to shift the debate and now it’s closing. They’ve lost, and they are going nuts.

The evidence is all around that this is not going to be the moment where America begins a slide into disarmed submission through an endless series of ever-harsher “reasonable restrictions” on our fundamental rights. You just have to look past the shrieking media harpies to see what’s really happening.

President Obama will return to Washington from Hawaii Thursday while First Lady Michelle Obama and her daughters plan to continue their vacation, adding at least $100,000 and probably more than $200,000 to taxpayer costs for the excursion.

Instead of accompanying her husband home on Air Force One, Mrs. Obama will fly on her own Air Force jet at a later date and require security and staff to remain in place in Hawaii for the length of her stay, which reportedly could extend until January 6.

The White House does not reveal the price tag for the Obamas’ vacations. But an estimate can be made given several known and likely expenses.

Assuming Mrs. Obama uses the type of plane she has flown before to Hawaii, the Air Force C-40B Special Mission Aircraft, the cost of a flight from Honolulu to Washington would be about $63,000. If the C-40B must be flown out to Hawaii to retrieve Mrs. Obama, as would seem likely, the first lady’s travel costs could amount to about $126,000, assuming the jet is dispatched from Washington.

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Hot Air: Benghazi penalties “bogus,” officials returning to work?

Via Drudge, it looks like accountability for the four deaths of Americans in Benghazi turned out to be temporary. The New York Post has learned that the four State Department officials that supposedly resigned after the Accountability Review Board report slammed Foggy Bottom for its “systemic failures” and “leadership and management deficiencies” will return to work after all — and all but one in the same post:

The four officials supposedly out of jobs because of their blunders in the run-up to the deadly Benghazi terror attack remain on the State Department payroll — and will all be back to work soon, The Post has learned.

The highest-ranking official caught up in the scandal, Assistant Secretary of State Eric Boswell, has not “resigned” from government service, as officials said last week. He is just switching desks. And the other three are simply on administrative leave and are expected back.

Brett Kimberlin, a convicted perjurer and bomber who abused the justice system by seeking and obtaining “peace orders” prohibiting blogger Aaron Walker from writing about him, a legal atrocity that was only overturned with great effort. In Aggravation: Kimberlin engaged in a campaign of bombing terror, wounded a man so badly that he later took his own life, laughed off the judgment against him for years, and now thinks that the law should prevent people from writing about him. In Mitigation: Nothing. Not a damn thing. Nothing at all. Except this. Maybe…